By Simba Jama

IN many parts of Africa today, we find tribes who claim Arabian origins and yet they are indistinguishable to the indigenous Africans.
The Chewa and the Sena people from Mozambique and Malawi all trace their history back to Arabia.
There are full blooded blacks in Zanzibar and the Swahili coast who say they came from Persia and they have ancient mosques their forefathers built to prove it, along with their unique culture.
This week we shall look at a people who currently inhabit the land of Ethiopia and are known as the Falasha.
The word Falasha originally meant ‘strangers’ since they came into Ethiopia from elsewhere.
They are also known as the Amhara and the language they speak is Shemitic and known as Amharic.
Its origins can be traced back to the Ge’ez and Aramaic languages of old.
The history of how these people got to Ethiopia from Arabia was documented in books such as the original Kebra Nagast and such early writings have helped a lot of other Africans from the Middle East in confirming their identity and even establishing their kingdoms.
Their forefathers take root in Menyelek the first son of King Solomon of Israel.
When Menyelek returned with the Ark of the Covenant, he laid it at a place called Axum and it was in the land of Abyssinia which is present day Ethiopia.
The empire which then arose was called the Axumite Empire and all the Emperors were to be from the descendants of the sons of Solomon.
The empire of Axum has a lot of recorded achievements in terms of early civilisation.
Even today, there remain numerous stone buildings and monuments that clearly show the high intellectual capacity of the ancient blacks.
The kingdom of Axum was related to the Sabeans, which were in Yemen and all the regions currently surrounding Ethiopia today, namely D’mt, Eritrea, Somalia and parts of Sudan were united.
While the Sabeans were great traders and strategically positioned between Africa, India and the Western world; the first currency was established in Axum and was known to many nations of that time.
The Axumite Empire is also famous for being the first great world power to become a Christian nation.
This was around 320 AD.
The emperor behind this conversion was known as Ezana and the church which came forth was and still is known as the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Ezana had grown up with a Syrian servant, who was a Christian and this is when the people of the land of Axum took up Christianity and emulsified it with their Judaic culture.
Rome and the rest of the churches, which arose in the West caught up only hundreds of years later and yet now they try to make it seem as if the whites were the first Christians.
The Christianity we see today is largely Westernised and thus seems unfitting for Africans.
In actuality, the first Christians were Africans and depicted the likes of Jesus as black people and such paintings can still be found in Ethiopia today.
It is said that the sons of Solomon ruled until a certain tribe known as the Zagwe took over and this act is remembered in Ethiopia as a breach of the law because since the days of Menyelek, it was dictated by the queen of Sheba herself that “…no woman shall be allowed to rule this land anymore.
“Only the descendants of Solomon would be allowed to rule.” This was an ordinance which was to never change.
However, by 1260 AD the Falasha people ruled again and this kingdom was preserved up to very recent times.
Their conversion to Christianity was not swift and may have very much contributed to the breaking down of the empire because there are numerous battles that kept arising between the Axumites and the Sabeans and these were over religion.
By the time of Muhammad the prophet of Islam, the Negus (King) of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) was referred to as the lion of Judah.
After rescuing the followers of Muhammad who had been persecuted in Arabia, the two became good friends and Nejashi the King said that the difference between Christianity and Islam is like two rays from the same light.
He allowed the Muslims to live in his land and their descendants are there to this day.
It is also said that although the Kingdom of Ethiopia remained Christian, Nejashi may have secretly accepted Islam.
When the king passed away, the prophet of Islam wrote a letter of lamentation.
He also wrote a letter to the Sabeans which can be found in the Quran and confirms that the people of that land were sons of Solomon and also great traders who were linked to the queen of Sheba.
What seems shocking to us now was general knowledge at some point in time and these early writings have become more historically important with time because the greatness of blacks is recorded in them.
In more recent times, the nation of Ethiopia under their King Ras Tafari was unsuccessfully attacked twice by Italy under Mussolini.
Ethiopia remains the only African country to never be wholly colonised.
Ethiopia has become an empowering name for black people around the world and the name appears several times in the Bible.
The intimate association of God’s chosen people of Israel with African nations such as Egypt and Ethiopia bears testament to their blackness of race.
Nowadays, the Falasha are referred to as black Jews and Beta — Israel.
But if this history teaches us anything, it is that the people of biblical Israel were indeed black and thus the ones who today call themselves Jews, but are not black are, but Jewish by religion and not by blood.
At one point in time the word Jew loosely meant the inhabitants of the land of Judea and thus the original Israelites have been flooded out by the gentiles off their homeland in the Middle East.
The VaRemba people, for example, trace their origins to the Israel of black people and are often referred to as black Jews.
This wrongly suggests that VaRemba are somehow related to the white people calling themselves Jews whose main activity is committing genocides and spreading terror across the Middle East.
White Jews are not the biblical Jews because there is all the evidence to prove that the Jews associated with Moses and Joshua were black and not white.
This confusion has also led European countries with Jewish churches to send missionaries to countries such as Ethiopia, Zimbabwe and South Africa, where groups of true Israelite origins can be found.
They have built synagogues in these African countries.
To resolve the colour difference between them and their black ‘relatives’ in Africa the white Jewish missionaries tell the huge lie that the ‘black’ Jews found in Africa were originally white.
On the same lie the Falasha have been incorporated into the white Israeli society including its brutal army.
The Falasha have been hoodwinked as they are not related to the white Jews of Israel whose Jewishness is only backed by the name and not history.